samedi 14 juin 2014

Article: To live & die in Donetsk - Matthew Crosston [eng +fr]

To Live and Die in Donetsk

Not that anyone would notice, but there is a disturbing and quite
frankly depressing reality taking place in eastern Ukraine. While it is
true the conflict that rages has been largely downplayed now and shoved
off the media spotlight in the West, whatever coverage does emerge tends
to be giving a relative free pass to Ukrainian police forces, special
operation forces, and the military as they seek to reinstitute control
over their national territory. At first glance this does not sound
particularly offensive: after all, a country should have the right to
protect its sovereignty and ensure that various groups do not
arbitrarily try to secede. But a deeper glance reveals that the way you
do this in the modern era is by killing people. And unfortunately, these
casualties cannot be universally declared as enemy combatants or
unlawful separatists, despite authorities in Kyiv wishing to push that
very scenario to their own people and outward to the rest of us in the
West. There have been many civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine over
the past two months. These people simply had the unfortunate
circumstance of being born and living in eastern Ukraine while having no
connection whatsoever to politics in Kyiv or geopolitics in Moscow or
foreign-policy strategy in Washington. And that is what reveals the sad
circumstances of the civil unrest in Ukraine and how it is laden with
blatant hypocrisy and the rationalization of killing.